Your Humble Blogger has occasionally written about games here at this Tohu Bohu, but not enough to warrant its own category. I’m talking about tabletop games, mostly, board games and card games, but also parlor games and video games and other games of skill and chance. Our local public library has a good collection of games, and I’ve been enjoying, over the last year or two, the opportunity to open one up and play it to see if it seems enjoyable. Many of them are enjoyable! Others, not so much. Still others seem like they might be enjoyable with a little application of house rules. And it occurred to me that quite a high percentage of Gentle Readers enjoy game-playing of various kinds, and might well enjoy it if I mused about games fairly often.\r\n
So. A new category.\r\n
I’ll open it up, though, with a discussion of the Maximum Fun Quotient<\/strong>. I’ve talked about the MFQ<\/strong> before, and at heart it’s a pretty simple concept: when you are playing a game, the goal is to maximize fun. In practice, it’s actually quite complex and can be difficult to implement. MFQ can apply to game design and playing style, to choosing your group of players and to choosing house rules, it can be as simple and vague as a mindset or as specific as an egg-timer for decision-making, it can affect the choice of games or of locations or of pieces.\r\n The main difficulty, and the reason why MFQ is important, is that maximizing fun for the players means maximizing the total fun for all<\/i> the players. If your group is four, and one is miserable, your total fun quotient will be low\u2014and in fact, for most groups, if one person really is miserable the others won’t be having much fun, either. That doesn’t mean, though, that it’s a strict maximin question. In game design, it’s bad for a player to be out of competition with an hour to play and no way to influence the game, but if a player can misplay for an hour and then come back and win, everybody else might be frustrated. In actually playing a game, perhaps taking it easy on the person in last so they won’t be too miserable will ruin the balance of competition for everyone else. Or someone will be just fine playing along with the rest of the gang who are having an excellent time, and that ain’t bad.\r\n The other thing about the MFQ is that it will, of course, be different for different players. I don’t get frustrated with a substantial element of chance, so cribbage has a pretty high MFQ for me—unless my opponent gets grouchy about getting screwed by the cards, in which case the game is a misery. I’m a terrible opponent in chess, because I get fidgety if I have to wait for my opponent to think about their moves, so people who enjoy chess will find it less enjoyable to play against me. I mostly play games with my household, these days, and while that’s terrific, it’s not necessarily going to make experiences widely applicable. Which is OK! Groups of people are different, one to another, which presumably makes game design interesting and fun.\r\n Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger believes that the concept and phrasing of the Maximum Fun Quotient antedates the Mood and Feelings Questionnaire both not the Modern Folk Quartet.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[210],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16583"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16584,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16583\/revisions\/16584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}